Lenders and banks print and issue tens or hundreds of millions of payment cards every year. With slim margins and increasingly competitive rewards programs, card providers sometimes differentiate their cards on aesthetic features, such as sports team branding, artistic designs, and personalization with family photos. Efforts to differentiate payment cards are somewhat limited, since cards must meet certain basic form factor requirements such as having a CR80 or ISO/IEC 7810 ID-1 size and format, which specifies the cards height, width, and depth.
One differentiator that has emerged is card material, with some premium cards having a metal body. A metal body payment card may offer various advantages such as durability, additional finish and design options, and a premium or luxury weight and feel when held or touched. Metal payment cards are often available to those who meet certain financial or lending requirements and may be paired with significant annual fees. To at least some extent, such annual fees for metal payment cards are due to the relatively high cost of producing metal payment cards. In contrast, plastic payment cards can be cheaply produced with simple tools and processes for cutting and printing on plastic. Since metal payment cards require more expensive materials for manufacturing with advanced tools for cutting, etching, and milling one or more metals, such as stainless steel, the cost of producing a single card can be upwards of 50 USD.
As competition increases and more card providers move towards premium payment cards, it may be advantageous to have systems and processes that can produce payment cards, in whole or in part, with improved quality, durability, efficiency, and/or reduced costs. Accordingly, there is a need for an improved payment card having metal therein and related system for producing such a payment card that addresses the present challenges such as those discussed above.